


powder day

by wrishwrosh



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, Ski Instructors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 05:36:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13675332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wrishwrosh/pseuds/wrishwrosh
Summary: A gust of wind roars through the pines. Maybe, Tyson thinks, the wind will keep blowing and he won’t be able to hear anything Gabe has to say. Maybe, the wind will blow so hard that this entire chairlift will be launched into the sun and he won’t have to talk to Gabe anymore, ever.





	powder day

**Author's Note:**

> in honor of the winter olympics, here's something that has very little to do with any actual olympic sports!

It’s somewhere around 7 in the morning and negative eight outside when Tyson rolls into the employee locker room. The heat doesn’t work right in his shitty Jeep because he and Nate are both too lazy to take it in to get fixed, so he's still a little groggy and a little frozen. In Tyson’s defense, his defenses are lowered.

He’s shuffling across the nubbly carpet towards the day’s assignment posting with his boots on his hands when Gabe snags him by the shoulder. 

“Hey, Tyson, buddy,” says Gabe, which is never a good start.

“Hello Gabriel,” says Tyson, who should know better than to engage.

“How are you this morning? Feeling good? Feeling fresh?” Gabe asks, with a dazzling grin. “Ready to get back out there?”

“I’m—normal,” says Tyson. “Thanks for asking?”

“I’m glad,” says Gabe. He pats Tyson on the shoulder just hard enough to be a little bit of an asshole. It is not hard enough to justify the way Tyson full-body shivers and almost drops a ski boot directly on his toes. 

Tyson hears EJ snicker from across the room, and he doesn’t look over. He’s trying a new thing where he doesn’t give EJ too much positive reinforcement, and it isn’t working at all.

“Guess who’s teaching today’s group lesson with you,” Gabe says. “It’s me!”

“You didn’t give me time to guess,” Tyson says. Then the actual words Gabe said sink in past the initial layer of competition and meanness. Tyson isn’t super sure where his liver is, but if he had to say, that’s probably where the sinking feeling in his gut is located. “That’s fine, but, like, why?” 

Tyson deals with kids’ lessons because he has the generally non-threatening vibe of a muppet, and kids recognize one of their own. Gabe usually teaches older women on vacation from Texas because he’s beautiful and Swedish, which suburban moms are usually into. Gabe has never taught a kid’s lesson before, so Tyson has always been relatively safe from his own bullshit at work.

Gabe just shrugs in response to Tyson’s question. “I don’t know. It’s what the schedule says.”

Tyson limps over to check the schedule. Sure enough, there’s Gabe’s name next to his on the day’s print-out, tacked up on the bulletin board next to the grooming map and the pair of underwear that Mikko refuses to claim because he’s embarrassed he lost them.

“We’re only assigned to two kids,” Tyson points out. “That’s a little weird.”

“I don’t know, it’s on the schedule,” says Gabe, louder. EJ is laughing again. He’s feeling very superior today for an asshole with no teeth.

This is obviously going to end very badly. Gabe is not great with children, and Tyson is not great with Gabe. Unfortunately, though, Tyson has an innate inability to tell Gabe no when he’s all morning-rumpled and soft like this. Or ever, which explains pretty much all of the dumbest situations Tyson has ever found himself in.

Tyson also has a thing for Gabe that can probably be seen from space. He's suffering, pretty much constantly.

“Alright, sure. This might as well happen. Nice leggings, by the way. Are those new?” Tyson’s on fire today. One day, he would like to think before he speaks.

Gabe twists around to look at his own ass. “These? Nah, I’ve had them all season.”

EJ is giving him an incredulous look from across the room. Tyson wonders if he can pass the blush off as windburn when he hasn’t done a single run yet.

 

+

Once Tyson’s all suited up, including tissues and stickers in his pocket in case of meltdowns, he and Gabe clomp through the building to the ski school drop off.

They introduce themselves to the kids, and then Gabe vanishes into the back office muttering something about liability waivers, which is a killer start. Tyson leans down to keep the kids from getting too antsy in their gear while they wait. If Gabe stalls too long, someone is going to have to pee and Tyson is going to have to kill Gabe.

“Where’d Mr. Gabe go, I like him better,” says the first kid, who has a purple unicorn horn on her helmet. “I want Mr. Gabe.”

“You and everybody else, kiddo,” says Tyson.

Her sister, decked out head to toe in Spider Man gear, squints up at him and says, “Mr. Gabe is from _Sweden_. You aren’t from Sweden, are you, Mr. Tyson.”

“I’m from Canada,” he says.

“Hmm. Boring,” Spider Man pronounces, wrestling with her goggles.

Tyson wiggles the goggles down off her helmet and over her eyes. “Gotta keep these on, bud. Otherwise you’ll go snowblind and you won’t be able to look at Mr. Gabe’s beautiful face at all during your lesson.”

“I never said he was beautiful,” she says.

“Weird, I definitely thought I heard that,” says Tyson. Gabe reappears, carrying no waivers of any kind, and gives him a thumbs up. “Okay, who’s ready to shred some powder?”

+

It takes exactly one run for Tyson to figure out why these two kids needed two instructors.

Unicorn skis like a maniac, while her sister looks like she would rather die than be on the mountain for one more second. The first hour and a half of the day isn’t the worst Tyson’s ever experienced, because he’s nothing if not skilled at fucking his own life up, but it’s rough. Spider Man won’t stop crying while Unicorn tries to escape to the back bowls, and Gabe won’t stop bending over and trying to reason with the two of them.

Tyson has done this before, and he knows there’s no reasoning with a seven-year-old who’s determined to take off her skis and walk back down the mountain. He also knows that Gabe makes the ski instructor uniform pants look really good, which is genuinely hard to do.

After a handful of runs, Tyson manages to wrangle the kids and Gabe inside for a relaxing early lunch of chicken tenders and chocolate chip cookies in the ski school cafeteria. They’re quickly approaching the point of no return for a breakdown, and Tyson is praying for calm.

“Okay, guys,” Tyson says, through a mouthful of macaroni and cheese. “What are we gonna do when we get back out there this afternoon?” 

“Go back down,” says Spider Man. 

“Bumps,” says Unicorn.

“Have lots of fun!” says Gabe.

“Wow, you guys are great listeners. We’re gonna _practice our turns_ , remember how I said that two minutes ago?”

“I mean, we can practice our turns and have fun at the same time,” Gabe says. “I hope.”

Tyson points a fork at him. “Mr. Gabe, valid point. Kids, nothing is more fun than staying in control and skiing at a safe speed, right?” He swivels the fork over to the girls, who are paying absolutely no attention to him and Gabe and are instead singing a song where every word rhymes with ‘skiing,’ which is mostly just ‘peeing.’ Business as usual. He steals a cookie for later.

Gabe leans over while he’s wrapping the cookie in a napkin to put in his pocket and whispers, “Is it always like this?”

Tyson glances at the kids, who have eaten exactly one chicken nugget apiece but are somehow drenched in ketchup. “Yes.”

“The moms are so much easier.”

“Yeah, cause they’re grown adults and they think you’re hot,” says Tyson, snagging an uneaten nugget off of Unicorn’s plate.

Gabe puffs up, smoothing his hair back. “You mean to tell me the elementary schoolers don’t find me dreamy?”

“Nah, I asked them earlier. They don’t care.”

“Why were you asking them? Were you taking a poll?”

Tyson feels his face heat up. Definitely just windburn at this point in the day. “Shut the f—be quiet. Don’t worry about it.”

He watches as the kids snag Gabe’s helmet off the table and attempt to shove it over the top of Unicorn’s. To everyone’s fascination, it fits.

Tyson takes two more cookies for the road and decides to start the process of herding the girls back outside. Once they get everybody’s gear back on the right people, Tyson takes the group over to the little chairlift where he’s pretty sure Nate is working. Thankfully, Nate’s there on loading duty at the bottom of the run.

Also thankfully, it’s a three person chair. “Oh no, looks like Mr. Gabe has to ride alone,” Tyson says, elbowing Gabe away.

“Why can’t I ride with the kids?” Gabe asks, wounded. 

Tyson pushes the girls towards the ski school express line and whispers, “Do you really want to be alone with them? Do you remember the kid two months ago who pissed himself the second I put the bar down?”

Gabe considers for about a quarter of a second, then skis directly over to the singles line. Tyson thinks about reminding him that he is a ski instructor and he’s allowed to use the express line, but he decides to let it be. He needs to talk to Nate.

“I’m having a crisis,” Tyson hisses over the kids’ heads.

Nate looks unimpressed. “You’re literally always having a crisis, dude. I’ve never met anybody who has more emergencies than you.”

“This is very legit,” says Tyson. Spider Man skis directly into his knees, and he twists around to yank her back into position in the line. “This is for real. Landy is working with me today, Nathan. I’m gonna die, and you’re gonna regret how you didn’t help me in my time of need, you mother—jerk.”

“You said literally the exact same thing about the time he offered to spot you a McFlurry,” says Nate as he half-heartedly shoves some snow around in the loading area.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tyson asks. The McFlurry situation was fucking dire, as Nate should remember. 

“All I’m saying here,” Nate says, ushering them onto the chair, “Is that it wouldn’t hurt if you calmed down just a little.” By the time Tyson has the safety bar down and the kids’ poles no longer stabbing him in the kidneys, he’s too far from Nate to keep talking. He thinks about shouting a very smart response back down, but he decides against airing his stupid business to the whole lift line.

Gabe beat them to the top, where he’s posing in front of the trail map. Tyson wonders if he just instinctively knows how to angle his body so his bone structure catches the light. “The answer to the trivia question at the bottom was wrong,” he says.

“How would you know?” Tyson asks.

Gabe huffs, putting a hand to his throat like he’s Tyson’s ninety-year-old grandmother. “It was a question about my homeland! They’re trying to tell me that Sweden has only fifty thousand lakes when in fact there are one hundred thousand—”

“You should definitely let Nate know. He cares a lot about Sweden,” Tyson says. 

“I like Sweden,” says Unicorn. “I want to tell them the right trivia.”

“It’s irresponsible, honestly. That’s such an easily available fact.”

Clearly no one is done with this, so they take the kids down the run one more time. Unicorn bombs down the run like her skis are on fire, and Gabe speeds after her. Spider Man, however, is clearly on the verge of losing her shit, so Tyson passes her a Wonder Woman sticker and lets her follow him slowly down the mountain. When they get back to the bottom the lift line is three times as long, but sacrifices have to be made.

“You could, like, be helpful to me or something,” Tyson tells Nate, watching Gabe herd the kids with his poles. “You could support me emotionally.”

“Dude, you’re my best friend, but I absolutely cannot do that.”

“I’ve already accidentally told him he’s hot like six times already today, Nate.”

“Like he doesn’t love that,” Nate scoffs.

It’s tough to flip somebody off in mittens, but Tyson’s pretty sure Nate gets his general gist. Nate just smacks him in the ass with a snow shovel as he hoists Unicorn onto the lift.

“By the way,” Nate shouts as the chair pulls away, “I’m having a party at the apartment tonight and I already invited Landy.”

“That’s a common space, MacKinnon!” Tyson yells back. “I live there too!”

Unicorn tugs on his pants and asks, “Can we do a black diamond yet? I wanna try the bumps.”

Spider Man bursts into tears. Tyson decides to call it a day. He has a feeling Gabe isn’t going to argue.

Getting off the mountain is not as easy as it sounds. Unicorn decides that she’s going to die if she can only do one more run, and Spider Man decides that one more run will kill her, so Tyson has to bring out the big guns and promise them a ride at the bottom. Somehow, he ends up slushing across the entire base dragging a kid on each pole. He’s not entirely sure how Landy managed to get out of sled dog duty, but apparently there’s just something about Tyson that makes kids want to treat him like a piece of furniture.

It’s a warm day for the middle of the season, and having fifty pounds of dead weight on each arm is not cooling Tyson down any. He’s sweated through two separate state-of-the-art moisture wicking base layers and possibly also his jacket, and he’s beginning to realize that he definitely forgot sunscreen this morning. The bright yellow ski instructor uniform parka, which makes Tyson look jaundiced, somehow complements Gabe’s eyes. Gabe looks like he just rolled out of a Patagonia ad, and Tyson looks like a boiled raccoon. He is under no illusions about what his hair will look like when he takes his helmet off, so he decides to keep it on.

“Hey Tys,” Gabe says, leaning on his poles. “Can we chat for a sec?”

“ _Right now_ , Gabriel?” says Tyson, panting. Showing a beautiful sense of timing, Spider Man chooses that moment to let out a teary hiccup and wipe her nose on Tyson’s sleeve.

“Actually, maybe it can wait until you’re a little less busy.”

“Landy, buddy. You are also being paid to help me manage the students we are teaching. Technically we’re both busy right now.”

“True, true.” Gabe nods knowingly, but does not take his eyes off of the snot smear on Tyson’s wrist. 

“You know what, I can take it from here if you wanna cut out early.” Gabe wilts with relief, then pulls a tissue out of his pocket and very gently wipes an additional snot smear off Tyson’s ass.

Tyson sighs. “Yeah, it's been a long day for everybody.”

“I’ll see you at Nate’s thing tonight, then,” Gabe says.

Tyson just does finger guns, because he's a monster, then sets to gently moving the kids out of snot range and reattaching them to the ends of his poles so he can drag them back to their parents.

+

“You have a fixation,” says Nate. “Sometimes I feel like I should actually be worried about you.”

Tyson probably deserves this, given that he didn't stop talking about Gabe all the way out of the employee parking lot, down the highway, and through the combination gas station-liquor store back to their apartment. 

“This is what you get for asking to carpool and then never giving me gas money,” Tyson says. He shoves aside some of the dishes on the kitchen counter with his elbow, trying to make space for the case of whatever shitty craft beer EJ is pretending to like this week.

“That’s not even at all related to what we’re talking about here,” says Nate.

“Give me gas money and maybe I’ll stop talking about gas money,” says Tyson.

“I just bought you pink wine and a whole bag of mini Snickers. Stop changing the fucking subject.”

Tyson snatches the wine out of the box Nate is carrying and rifles around in their overstuffed junk drawer until he finds some tape and a pen. He labels the bottle TYSONS DO NOT TOUCH before sticking it in the fridge to chill and turning back to Nate.

“Can’t you just fuck him and get it out of your system? Make my life a little less painful?”

“Buddy, that’s like telling me to fuck _the sun_.”

EJ always likes to skulk around the base for a while after his shift ambushing people whose bindings he thinks are are loose, but today he apparently decided to come home just in time to hear Tyson say that. Along with what seems like half of Tyson’s friends and coworkers. It’s a stellar start to the night.

Tyson watches Nate bustle around the apartment showing people where the drinks are and making people take their shoes off and generally half-asses his hosting duties for a few minutes before heading into the kitchen to give EJ shit.

He lobs a beer at EJ’s head. Unfortunately, EJ catches it. “An overpriced bitter pisswater for you, Erik,” Tyson yells.

“Thanks, T-Bear, I think we might have some cotton candy vodka and Reddi Whip in the fridge if you wanna fix yourself a little something,” EJ shouts back. Of course, Gabe pops his head into the kitchen at just that moment.

“You have whipped cream?” He asks. 

EJ scoffs so violently he almost hits his head on a cabinet. “That’s not _whipped cream_ , it’s a can of white sugary bullshit.” 

“Maybe I like white sugary bullshit,” Gabe says. “Oh, hey Tyson. What a coincidence, seeing you here.”

“I’ve lived here for months? We’ve all hung out here before?”

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” says EJ.

“Nice place you got here,” says Gabe. Tyson goes for the wine.

+

Tyson knows himself, and he knows himself when he’s drunk, and he knows he should really have some kind of supervision right now. Alas, there’s nobody around at the moment to stop him from marching up to Gabe as directly as he can at the moment. There’s nothing but Tyson’s own good judgement to prevent him from grabbing Gabe by the shoulders and staring him straight in the eyes. There’s nobody to slap a hand over his mouth before he says, pretty much into Gabe’s chin, “ _Landesnerd_. What is even up with you?”

“What,” says Gabe, pretty much into Tyson’s nose.

“Landy, you Swedish nightmare, being around you is like—I told Nate this earlier, Nate can tell you—it’s like fuck, fucking—the sun! That’s what it’s like. It’s way too much.”

Gabe, looking a little queasy, detaches himself and says, “I’m gonna go find you some water. Or, uh, Nate. Or something,” and then Tyson is alone in the foyer with the sinking and familiar feeling that everything about this conversation has gone pretty badly wrong.

Tyson has no idea what to do, so he goes to find Nate. He’s out on their apartment’s tiny balcony, smoking up and staring out at the little sliver of the mountain they can see between the trees and the other condos.

“Do you ever,” Tyson asks, “do something so incredibly fucking stupid that you just wanna, like, rip your own arms off?”

Nate turns and looks at him kind of sadly. “Dude. What the fuck.”

“Don’t worry about it! It’s fine, I’m fine. It’ll be fine.”

“That’s too many fines.” He wraps a giant, warm arm around Tyson’s shoulders, and they sit there together and watch the little Snowcat lights make their way down the mountain until people start to leave.

+

Tyson wakes up the next morning with a nasty headache and an even nastier feeling of bone-deep shame. In the kitchen, Nate is slamming cabinets and making appliances beep in preparation for his shift, which means it’s about quarter to seven in the morning and Tyson is in hell.

Tyson fully plans to spend his entire day off wallowing in despair and his own sweat, but his drunk self clearly had it out for him. The shade on the window across from his bed is wide open, and it’s already blindingly sunny out. He peels himself out of bed with grand plans of making his room into a cave and immediately unpeeling himself right back in, but he stops short when he looks outside and sees fully a foot of fresh powder blocking the sill.

“Fuck,” he says to himself. If there’s this much fresh snow, he feels a little obligated to ski. But he doesn’t have to enjoy it.

“T-Beauty, you up?” Nate shouts from the kitchen. He is now.

It’s a little bit difficult to ski and sulk at the same time, especially when it’s a beautiful day with beautiful snow, but Tyson is nothing if not a professional. He immediately exiles himself to a weird little lift right at the edge of the ski area boundary, where he knows he’s probably not going to see any of his coworkers. Plus, as a bonus, there’s a non-zero chance that he might ski straight into a tree well and put himself out of his misery.

The lift is a rickety little two person number from the seventies. It moves very slowly, and Tyson knows from experience that it’s pretty good for sulking, if only because he can usually get a chair to himself. 

That’s his grand plan for the day, up until he shuffles up to get on and somebody swoops out of the singles line just in time to plop down next to him. Naturally, it’s Gabe. 

Before Tyson has a chance to throw himself off the chair, they’re up off the ground. 

“Hey Tyson,” Gabe says, with the usual blast of charisma. Tyson manages to grimace in return and tries very hard to pretend that he and Gabe are not currently touching ankle to shoulder.

The chair trundles along. Tyson starts counting poles to prevent himself from swan diving right off, because the chair is too old and shitty to even have a safety bar. Then, just before pole number nine, like a scene from Tyson’s literal worst nightmares, the lift starts to slow down. It slows, and slows, and finally grinds to a stop right under the pole. They’re left swinging gently in total silence. It’s a very, very small chair.

“So, I have a small confession to make,” says Gabe, breaking the quiet. “Remember how I got scheduled on the kids’ lesson with you?”

“Yeah, Gabe. That was yesterday. I wasn’t even drunk for that part.”

“Ha,” says Gabe. He doesn’t laugh, he just says the word ‘ha’. Tyson didn’t think it was particularly funny either, and he doesn’t really appreciate the effort. “I wasn’t supposed to be on that shift.”

“I figured,” Tyson says. “You weren’t much help.” A gust of wind roars through the pines. Maybe, Tyson thinks, the wind will keep blowing and he won’t be able to hear anything Gabe has to say. Maybe, the wind will blow so hard that this chair will be launched into the sun and he won’t have to talk to Gabe anymore, ever. But it stops.

“Yeah, uh, I had to bribe EJ to change the schedule so I could work with you. Now I owe him a favor and he’s making it a whole thing, so if he’s weird to you—”

“Why?” Tyson asks. “Why bother, dude? Why are you here right now, why are you even on this lift?”

Gabe waves a hand at the thirty feet between the chair and the ground. “Kinda hard for me to be anywhere else at the moment.”

“Don’t be a dick, you know what I mean.” Tyson would pay literally any amount of money for this chair to start moving again. Thirty feet really isn’t that long of a drop, especially if he lands in powder. He’ll only break some of his bones, probably.

Gabe sighs and slumps, clacking his dangling skis together underneath the chair. “I just wanted to show you that we could have a chill, fun time together for once. But then the kids were nuts, and I didn’t get to talk to you, and then you got drunk and, like, got mad at me for existing—“ He shrugs, takes his gloves off, and immediately puts them back on again. “Anyway, I thought maybe we should talk now.”

Tyson decides he’s only equipped to address part of that statement. “Well, if you wanted to have a chill, fun day, volunteering to hang out with seven-year-olds is probably not the way to do that.”

Gabe doesn’t say anything, which is pretty much a surefire way to get Tyson to keep talking. Tyson takes a deep breath and lets himself deflate a little bit. 

“What do you mean ‘for once?’” He asks. “Having fun together _for once_. I kinda thought we had fun most of the time.”

“You just always seem kinda—stressed? Whenever we’re together?” Well, that’s sure one way to put it.

“I really do like hanging out with you. I just don’t wanna make it weird, or make you uncomfortable. Or anything like that.”

“Why would I be uncomfortable?” Gabe asks. “Tys, I like you a lot.”

Tyson chokes out a stupid laugh. “C’mon, no way you don’t know what I mean. I come on _really strong_.”

Miraculously, Gabe blushes. Tyson takes a moment to think about the conversation they’re having.

“Wait, this is really stupid.”

“Sorry, is it?” Gabe asks. Tyson takes off his helmet and goggles. Then, he reaches over to take off Gabe’s helmet and Gabe’s goggles. Then, he leans in, slow enough that Gabe could easily push him off the lift if he’s reading this situation wrong, and kisses him.

Gabe doesn’t push him off the lift. 

Instead, Gabe leans in closer and opens his mouth. He smells like hot fleece and Blistex, and his hair is soft when Tyson gets his hands in it to pull him closer still. He barely even flinches when Tyson accidentally knocks him in the side of the face with a pole he forgot to unstrap from his wrist. Just as Tyson pulls away to catch his breath, the lift makes an awful grinding noise and chugs back to motion.

Tyson leans away a little more and laughs. “You know,” he says, “it’s supposed to be good luck when you get stopped right under the pole. It’s never happened to me before.” 

Not two seconds after he says that, Gabe leans back in and accidentally knocks Tyson’s helmet and gloves off his lap and into the snow below them. 

“Oh my god,” says Gabe.

“Holy shit,” says Tyson.

“Good luck, huh?” says Gabe, knocking his boot against Tyson’s. Tyson’s ski immediately detaches.

“Yeah,” he says, pressing into Gabe’s side as he turns around to watch the single ski disappear behind them. “Good luck.”

**Author's Note:**

> i don't even LIKE skiing! the character of spiderman is 100% inspired by my personal experiences with ski school circa age nine. unfortunately i come from a Skiing Family and Hot Fleece Smell was a deeply formative part of my childhood so here we are
> 
> come say hey on tumblr if u want! my main is [wrishwrosh](http://wrishwrosh.tumblr.com/) and i also have a [hockey blog](http://softbarrie.tumblr.com/)


End file.
